To clean or not to clean....

I bet this has been raised before, but if it has I couldn't find the thread. Anyway - if you look at, say, Rolf Harris's palette, you'll see he has great pyramids of dried paint, which presumably he decapitates from time to time to stop the thing weighing a ton. Look at some other artists' palettes, and they're beautifully clean, gleaming, polished - works of art in their own right. Mine, presently, is a rather disgusting combination of the two - I don't have the Harris Pyramids, but having been working on several oils lately, there are dried on bits of paint.... streaks of this and that... piles of quite workable paint which I'm reluctant to discard. Normally, whenever I finish a painting I clean my palette - scrape the unused paint off with a painting knife, wipe the residue with paper towels, then polish the wood with white spirit, finishing off with a very light rub with Linseed oil. And I feel virtuous. But messy; quite incredibly messy..... I have newspapers filled with the paint scrapings which have to be disposed of; the smell of white spirit on my clothes, hands, all over the flat.... Not by nature a very tidy person, I've been wondering whether I really need to do all this every time; whether I couldn't just, you know, sort of ..... leave it..... What do you think? Would this be a perfectly sound and acceptable thing to do, or the first stage of my descent into filthy old man mode.....? I await your replies apprehensively.